7 Regarding the Pain of Others SUSAN SONTAG ®for Davidcumulative olin by more than «cetiy and has worn of thse profesional, seciined out known sounds, Information about wht is happening elsewhere Caled news, tues conf and viene ~ ite lead rune the venerable guideline of tabla and rey fourhour healne news shows ~ (0 which the esponse We now kaow what happens everyday thoughout the whol word. the descriptions given by dally joumalits pu, ai were, hove in agony on is of battle under the eyes of news per] eaders and hele ceies esnate ia thei Moynier was thinking of the soaring casualties of com butants on all sides, whose suflesings the Red! Cross was founded to succor impartially The killing power of armies in bute had been raised to a new magnitude by weapons introduced shorty after the Cximean Wat (1854-58), sch as the breech Jouding rifle and the machine gun, But though the agonies ofthe batdeield had become present as never before to those who would only read about them in the press, it was obviously an exaggeration, in 1899, to say chat ‘ne knew what happened ‘every day throughout the whole work’, And, though the sufferings endured in fiaway wars now do assaulk our eyes and ears even as they happen, itis sill an exaggeration, What i called in news parlance the work! ~ You give us twenty.rwo minutes, well give you the world’, one radio network intones several mes an hour ~ i (unlike the world) a very small place, both geo: graphically and thematically, and what i thought worth knowing about icf expected to be transmitted tersely and cemphateally ‘Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in select number of wars happening elewhere is something con steucted, Principally inthe form shat is registered by cameras, i flares up, i shased by many people, and fades fom view In contrat to a writen account ~ which, depending on its compleity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, pitched larger or smaller readership ~ a photograph as only one language ands destined potentially forall.In the fist important wars of which there are accounts by photographers, the Crimean War nd the American Civil ‘War, and in every ather war unt he Base World War, com bat elf was beyond the camers’s ken. As for the war photographs published between 1014 and sor8, nearly ll anonymous, they were - insofar as they did convey some thing of the terots and the devastation ~ generally in the epic mode, and were usualy depictions of an atermath the corpse strewn or lunar landscapes left by treach warfare the guted French vilages the war had pased through, The ‘hotographic monitoring of war as we know it had to wait few more years fora radical upgrade of professional equip -ment: lightweight carers, sich a the Leica, using 35mm fim that could be exposed thse ix ines before the eamers needed to be reloaded. Pictures could now be taken in the thick of ble, military censorship permiting, and civilian victims and exhausted, beyrimed solies studied up cose “The Spanish Civil War (936-30) war the first war to be witnessed (covered in the modern sense: by a corps of pro fessional photographers atthe lines of military engagement snd in the towns under bombardment, whose wore was ‘xmediatly seen in newspapers and magazines in Spain nd broad, The war America waged in Vietnam, the first to be witnessed day afer day by television camera, introduced the home front ta new tele-ntimacy with death and destrcton, Byer since, bates and massacres fied as they unfold have ben a routine ingredient ofthe ceaseless flow of domestic smal scren entersinment, Creating a perch for a particular conflict in the consciousness of viewers exposed to dramas from everywhere requires the diy cision and reiffsion of sippets of footage about che conflict. The understanding ‘of war among people who have not experienced war is now chilly a product of the impact of these images Something becomes real = (0 those who are else here, following i as ‘news’ — by being photographed. But catastrophe that experienced wil ofen seem eerily Hke its representation, The attack on the World Trade Center ‘on September 11, 2001, was described a5 “unrea’ ‘surreal lke 2 movie’, in many ofthe fist accounts of those who escaped from the towers or watched ffom nearby. (Afer fur decades of big budget Hollywood disaster fms,‘ felt Tike a movie’ seems to have displaced the way survivors ofa catastrophe used to express the short-term unassimilablity ‘of what they bad gone trough ‘felt ikea dream’) [Nonstop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the rhhorograph has the deeper bite, Memory freeze frames its basic unit s the single mage. In an era of information overload, the photograph provides « quick way of appce ending something and a compact form for memosizing it ‘he photograph is ike a quotation, or a maxim or prover ach of us mentally tacks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall Cite the most famous photograph taken during the Spanish Civil War, che Republican soldier “shotby Robert Capa's camera atthe same moment he i hit by an enemy bullet, and virally everyone who has heand of that war can sommon to mind the grainy black-and-white image of a man in a white shtt with rolledup sleeves col: Iapsing backward on a hillock, his sight arm fang behind him as his fle Teaves his grip: sbout to fl, dead, onto his own shadow. Itisashockingimage, and that isthe point. Conseipted as par of joumalisn, images were expected to arrest attention, startle, surprise. As the ol advertising slogan of Pais Match founded in 1049, had it: "The weight of words, the shock o photos’ The hunt for more dramatic (as theyre offen escibed) images drives the photographic enterprise, and it parc ofthe normality ofa caltre in which shock has hecome a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value Beauty will be convulsive, oF will not be,” proclaimed André Breton. He called this aesthetic deal ‘surrealist’, but in a culture radically revamped bythe ascendancy of mercantile ‘ales, 1o ask that images be jarring, clamorous, eye-opening seems like elementary realism as well as god business sense How che to get attention for one's producto ones ar? How else to make a dent when there is incessant exposure 0 images, and overexposure to handful of images seen gain and agai? The image as shock and the image as cliché are two aspects ofthe same presence. Snty-fve years ago all photographs were novelties to some degree. (It would have been inconceivable to Woolf who did appear on the cover of Tein x57 thatone day her fae would become a much reproduced image on T-shirts, coffee mags, book bags refrigerator magnets, mouse pads) Atrocity photographs were scarce in che winter of a7: the depiction of war's horrors in che photographs Woolf evokes in Th seemed slmost ike clandestine knowledge, Our scvation is akiogether diffrent. The ultrfumilise,uleacelebrated image ~ of an agony, of uin~ san unavoidable feature of ur eamers-medited knowledge of w Even SINCE CAMERAS WARE invented in 1839, photography has hep with 2 camera is, literlly, a ace of something brought company with death. Because an image produced before the lens, photographs were superior to any painting as mementa ofthe vanished past and the dear departed. To scize death in the making was another matter: the ca reach remained limited 2s long as it had tobe lugged about, set dovin, steadied. ut ance the camera was emancipated from the tripod, tly portable and equipped with a rang Finder and a varesy of lenses that permited unprecedent. feats of close observation from a disant vantage point, ture taking scquired an immediacy and authority greater than any verbal account in conveying the horror of mass year when the power of produced death, If there was photographs to define, not merely record, the most abornin able realties trumped all che complex narrative, suey it‘vas 1945, with the pitures taken in April and early May at Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau in the fist days afer the camps were liberated, snd those taken by Japanese witnesses such as Yosuke Yamahatain the days following the Incineration ofthe populations of Hiroshime and Nagasski ineaiy August. The era of shock — for Burope ~ began three decades caulier in og. Within a year ofthe start ofthe Great War, sit was known fora while, mvch that had been taken for sranted came to seem fragile, even undefendable. The night mare of suicdally lethal matary engagement from. which the warring countries were unable to extricate themselves — above all, the daly slaughter inthe trenches on the Western Front ~ seemed 10 many to have exceeded the capacity of words to describe In 1015, none other than dhe august master of the intiete cococning of reality in word, the sn ofthe verbose, Henry James, decated to The Now ie Times: “One finds i in the mit ofall his as hard to apply one’s words as to endure one's thoughts. The war has used up words they have weakened, they have deteror ated...’ And Walter Lippmann wrote in ipa: Photographs have the kind of authoxty over imagination today, which “om efi dy ofthe Bete ofthe Sori, Jays, Sty thous reach Foote hd vance by fe ies the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly eal Photographs had the advancage of uniting two contradic tory features. Their credentials of objectivity were inbuilt Yet they always had, necesarily a point of view. They were record ofthe real —incontroverubl, 38 no verbal account, however impartial, could be since a machine was doing the cording, And they bore witness o the real since a person had been there to take them, Photographs, Woolf claims, ‘ae not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact addresed tothe eye The truth is they are not ‘simply’ anything, and certainly not regarded just as facts, by Woolf or anyone else. For, as She immediately add, ‘the eye is conmected with the bai the brain with the nervous system. That system sen its messages in a flash through every past memory and present feeling” This sleight of hand allows photographs 1 be bath objective record and personal testimony, both a fitful copy for transcription of an actual moment of resliey and an ines pretation ofthat realty a feat iterate has long aspired to, but could never stain inthis itera sense, Those who sres the evidentiary punch of image making by cameras have 1o finesse the question of the subjectivity of the image-maker. For the photography of atrocity, people want the weight of witnessing without the tine of artistry. which is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance Pictures of hellish events seem miote authentic when theydon’t have the look that comes from being propery’ ighted and composed, because the photographer either is an amateur or ~ just a serviceable has adopted one of several Familiar antiart styles, By lying low, artistically speaking such pictues ave thought ro be less manipulative —all widely Aiseiboted images of suffering now stand under that suspicion ~ and less likely to arouse facile compassion or Slentifcation. The les plished pictures are not only welcomed as pos sessing a special kind of authenticity. Some may compete with the bes, so permissive are the standards for a memor able, eloquent picture. This wes illustrated by an exemplary show of photographs documenting the destruction of the World "Trade Center that opened in storefront space in Man: hatan's SoHo io late September 3200, The organizers of Here Ie New York ste show was esonantly titled, had sent outa «all invting everyone ~ amateur and professional - who had mages ofthe attack ad is aftermath to bring thems in. There ‘were more than a thousand responses in the fist weeks, and fiom everyone who submited photographs, a least one pic ture was accepted for eshbit,Unatrbuted and uncaptioned, they were all on display, hanging in two narrow rooms or included ina slide show on one ofthe computer monitors (and on the exhibie’s website), and for sl, inthe form of high-quality inkjet print, forthe same small sur, ewenty five dollars (proceeds to a fund benefiing the chikren of those killed on September 1). After the purchase was o completed, the buyer could learn whether she had peshaps ‘ought a Gilles Peres (vho was one of the organizers of the show) or a James Nachtwey of a picture by a reiged schoolteacher who, leaning out the bedroom window of er rent-contolled Village aparment with her pointand shoot had caught the north towers fel. ‘A Democracy of Photo ‘graphs’ the subsite ofthe exhibit, suggested that there ws ‘work by amateurs as good as the work of the seasoned pro- fessionals who participated, And indeed there was ~ which proves something about photography, if not necessary something about cultural democracy. Photography isthe ‘only major arin which professional taining and years of experience do not confer an insuperable advantage over the untisined and inexperienced - thi for many reasons, among ‘hem the large role that chance (or luck) plays in the taking of pictures, and the bss toward the spontaneous, the rough, the imperfect (There i8 no comparable level playing fckd In fterature, whee virally nothing owes to chance of hick and where refinement of langage usally incurs no penalty ‘or in the performing arts, where genuine achievement is ‘unatainable without exhaustive training and daily practice ‘oF in film-making, which i not guided to any significant Gegre by the anti ar prejudices of much of contemporary art photography) ‘Whether the photograph is undentood asa naive object for the work of an experienced ariicer, is meaning and the viewer's response - depends on how the picture is‘deified or misidentified that i, on words, The organizing ‘ea, the moment, the place, andthe devoted public made thie exhibit something of an exception. ‘The crowds of solemn New Yorkers who stond in in for hours on Prince Steet everyday throughout the fill f 20010 see Hee IN York had no need of captions. They had, ifanything a surfeit of understanding of what they were looking at, builing by building street by street he fies, the deri, the far, the tshaustion, the grief But one day captions wil be needed of course, And the misreading and the misrememberings, and new ideological uses for che pictures, will make their aifference, Normally, there i any distance orn the subject, what a photograph ‘says an be read in several ways. Eventually, one reads into the phorograph what it should be saying Splice into along take of a perfectly deadpan face the shots of such disparate material ay a bow! of steaming soup, woman in a coffin, a ehild playing with a oy bear, and the viewers ~ as the fist theorist of fm, Ley Kuleshov, famously demonstrated in his workshop in Moscow in the 1o208 ~ will marvel atthe subilety and range ofthe actor's expresions Inthe esse of stil photographs, we use what we know of the drama of which the picture's subject is part, ‘Land Distribution Mecting, Extremadura, Spain, 1936, the much reproduced photograph by David Seymour ‘Chim’ of a gaunt woman standing with a baby at her ‘breast Jooking upwand (intently? apprehensvely?), is often onmeone fearfully scanning the sky for tacking planes. The expressions on her face and the faces around her seem changed with apprehensiveness. Memory thas altered the image, according to memory's needs, confer ring emblematic satus on Chin's picture not for wat iis described as showing (an outdoor political meeting, which took place four months before the war stared) but for ‘what was soon to happen in Spain that would have sch ‘enormous resonance: air stacks on cities and villages, for the sole purpose of destoying them completely, being ‘wed as.a weapon of war for he frst time in Europe” Before long the sky did harbor planes that were dropping bom on Tandless peasants ike those inthe photograph. (Look again at the nursing mother, at her furrowed brow, her squin her halfopen mouth. Does she stil seem a8 apprebensive? Doesn't now seem a if hei squinting because the sn is inher eyer) “The photographs Woolf received ae treated as a window in Pats Guise, Bu they were no tot precedent. Dag the Fat Weld Wr, there Ma ben same price elie ceive ombing fr example, the Cearans ads om Zapping Anrwerp Yar ore ktaly~staing wt he tacky al es‘on the war: transparent views of thei subject. It was of no ‘eres to her that exch had an ‘author’ = that photographs represent the view of someone ~ although ic was precisely in thelnte 150 that the profession Fbearing individual witness to war and war's atrocities witha camera was forged. Once ‘warphotography mostly appearedin daily and weekly news popers. (Newspapers had been printing photographs since 1880,)Then, in addltion vo the older popular magazines fom the late nineteenth century sch as National Geographic and ‘What bof ple syn wit athe ght of sian rm thes wat happen in Spee sr of things were the ts orn he death ems ic x Ca eich we fo Ferner Musriete Zeitung that wsed photograph a laste, tions, large-iculation weekly magazines atived, notably the French Va (in 1929) the Amesican Life (i 936), and the Brish Picare Pout (in 298), that were enily devoted to pictures accompanied by brieFtests keyed to the photos) and ture sores’ at last fur or five pictures by the same photographer trailed by «sony that farther dramatized the images. In a newspaper, twat the picture ~and chee was only one that accompanied the story Further, when published in « newspaper, the wa photo raph was surrounded by words (the article illustrated and other articles), while ma magazine, s was mone likely to be adjcent toa competing image that was peddling something. ‘When Capa's st-the-momentof death picture ofthe Repub- ean soldier appeared in Lifton July 1, ro occupied the ‘whole ofthe sight page facing ton the left was afl page xdvertsement for Vis, men's hais cream, with a small picture of someone exerting himself at tennis and a lange portrait ofthe same man in a white dinner jacket sporting 2 head of neatly pare, slckedsdown, lustrous aic* Thedloutble spread — with each ute of the camera implying the invisibility ofthe other ~ seems not just bizarre but curiously dated now In a aystem based on the maximal reproduction and ifasion of images, witnessing requires the creation of sar witness, renowned for thelr Bravery and 2cal in pro curing important, disturbing photographs, One of the Best issues of Pletue Post (December 3,198), which ran a port folio of Capa’ Spanish Civil War pictures, used ats cover a head shot of the handsome photographer in profile holding ancamera to his fice: "Tae Grestest War Photographer in the ‘World: Robert Caps’, War photographers inherced what hmour going to oar still had among the antibelleose especially when the war was felt tobe ane of those rare con fits in which someone of conscience would be impelled to take sides, (The wat in Bosoia, measly sixty years later: inspired similar partisan fecings among the journals who lived for atime in besieged Strajevo) And, in contrat tothe roue-i8 war, which, sews clear to many ofthe vitor, had been a colossal mistake, the second ‘would war was unani ously fle by the wlaning side to have been a necessary ‘wary a war that had 4 Be foughe Photojournalism came iat its own inthe cary 19408 ~ wartime, This least controversial of modern wars, whose justness was sealed by the fll revelation of Naz evil as the ‘war ered in 194, ollered photojournalists 4 new legit macy, one that had litle place for the lfewing disidence that had informed much ofthe serious use of photographs ia the interwar period, including Fedsich’s War Aganse War nd the easy pictares by Cap, the most celebrated gore in 4 generation of politically engaged photographers whose ‘work centered on war and vitimbood. Inthe wake of the ‘new mainsteam liberel consensus about the traci of acute social problems, issues of the photographer's own livelinood and independence moved tothe foreground. One result was the formation by Capa with a few frends (who included Chim and Henri Carter Bresson) ofa cooperative the Magnum Photo Agency in Paris in 197. The immediate purpose of Magnum which quickly Became the most nfl ential and prestigious consorsium of photojournalists — was a practice one: t represent venturesome ffeeance photo ‘aphers tothe pictore magszines sending them on assign rents. At the same time, Magoum’s charter, moralistic in the way of other founding charters ofthe new ineematinal conganizations and guilds crested inthe immediate postwar period, spelled out an enlarged, ethically weighted mision for photojournalists to chronicle their own time, bet ime lof war or atime of peace as fatsminded witnesses fee of chauvinistc prejudices In Magmum’s voice, photography declared tel a global enterprise. ‘The photographer's nationality and national junalistic afiition were, in principle, ierlevant. Te pho cographer could be fom anywhere. And his or her beat was the world” The photographer was a rover, with warsof unusual interest (for there were many wars) a fivorite destination ‘The memory of war, however, ike all memory, i mestly local. Armenians the majority in diaspora, kep alive the memory of the Armenian genocide of ros; Greeks don't fanget the angus acy civil war in Greece chat raged through the late s94os. But fora wat to break out ofits immediate constituency and become a subject of intemational teen tion, it must be regarded as something of an exception, ws wars go, and represent more than the cashing interests ofthe beligerents themselves. Most wars do not acquire the requis filler meaning, An example: the Chaco War 1932-3), a butchery engaged in by Bolivia (popaltion one million) and Paraguay (Ehree and a lf milion) that took the lives of one hundred thowsind solders, and which was covered by a German photojouralist, Will Ruge, whose super close-up bate pictures areas forgotten as that war atthe Spanish Civil War inthe second half ofthe 19305, the Serb and Croat ware agsinst Bosnia in the mi10008, the drastic worsening ofthe Isael+Palestinian conflic that began in 20 these contests were guaranteed the stention| ‘of many cameras because they were invested with the mea ing of larger struggles: the Spanish Civil War because it was a stand against che fascist menace, and (in retrospect) 3 dress rehearsal forthe coming European, or ‘world’, war the Bosnian war because was the stand ofa small eging southern European country wishing to remain multcultutal 1s well as independent against the dominant power in the region and its neo-sscist program of ethnic cleansing: and the ongoing confice over the character and governance of teritories claimed by both Israch Jews and Palestinians because ofa variety of fladhpoines, staring with the inveter ae fame or notoriety of the Jewish people the unique resonance of the Nazi extermination of Baropean Jewry, the crucial support tha the Unied States gives tothe state fof lsael, and the identification of frael ae an apartheid state maintaining a brutal dominion over the lands eapruned in 1967. In the meantime, far rueler wars in which civilians are relentlessly slaughtered from the air and massacred fon the ground (the decades-long civil war in Sudan, the Tragi campaigns against the Kurds, the Russian invasions and occupation of Chechnya) have gone relatively unde Photographed “The memorable sites of suffering documented by admired Photographers ia the 1950s, 19sas and early isos were mostly in Asis and Afica ~ Werner Bischof’ photographs ‘of famine vitims in India, Don MeCallin’s pictures of victime of war and famine in Bafa, W. Eugene Smich’s Photographs of the victims of the lethal potion of 3 Tepinese fishing vilage. The Indian and Afvcan fines were not just ‘narura’ disasters; they were preventable; they ‘were crimes of great magnitude. And what happened in Minamata was obviously a etme: the Chisso Corporation knew i was dumping mercunladen waste into the bay(Alier 4 year of taking pictures, Smith was severely and permanemly injured by Chisw goons who were ordered to pt an end to his camera inguiry) But war isthe langest frime, and since the midrg6os, most of the bestinovn photographers covering wars have thought their role was to ‘how war's ‘ea’ fice, The color photographs of tormented Vietnamese villagers and wounded American conscripts that Lamy Bustoses took and 14 published, starting in 198, censnly fortified the outcry agains the American presence in Vietnam. (ln 397% Burrows was shot down with thees other photographers aboard a US military helicopter ying ‘over the Ho Chi Minh Trail Laos. if, t0 the dismay of ‘many who, lke me, had grown up with and been educated by its revelatory pictures of war and of art, closed in 1972) Burrows was the fist important photographer do a whole war in eoloe another gin in vermin, that 8, shock In he current political mood, the fendest to the military in decades the pictures of wretched hollow eyed Gls that ‘once seemed subversive of militar and impevaiy may seem inspirational. Tie revised subjet ordinary American youngmen doing their unpleasant, ennobling duty ‘Exception made for Burope today, which has claimed the right to opt out of warenaking, 4 remains as true as ever that most people wil not question the rationalzasons offered by their government for starting oF continuing a ‘war, le takes some very peclla circumstances for & wat ‘become genuinely unpopular. (The prospect of being killed is not necessarily one of them.) When it does, the materia ithered by photographers, which they may think ‘of as unmasking the confi, is geat use. Absent sucha protest, the same antiwar photograph may be rese ae showing pathos, or heroism, admirable heroism, in an unavoidable struggle that canbe concluded only by victory orby defeat ‘The photographer's intentions do not determine the mean ingof the photograph, which wll have ts own carer, blow bythe whims and loys ofthe diverse communities that have use fori